The language was first described by the explorers Knud Rasmussen and Peter Freuchen who travelled through northern Greenland in the early twentieth century and established a trading post at Dundas in 1910. Inuktun does not have its own orthography and is not taught in schools. However, most of the inhabitants of Qaanaaq and the surrounding villages use Inuktun in their everyday communication.

The language is an Eskimo–Aleut language and dialectologically it is in between the Greenlandic Kalaallisut and the Canadian Inuktitut. The Polar Inuit were the last to cross from Canada into Greenland and they may have arrived as late as in the eighteenth century.[4] The language differs from Kalaallisut by substituting Kalaallisut /s/ with an h-sound often pronounced like a palatal fricative as in Germanich. Inuktun also allows more consonant combinations than Kalaallisut and has some minor grammatical and lexical differences.